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UD students aid in planning of Tilton Park upgrade

Yann Ranaivo, The News Journal
10:47 p.m. EST March 8, 2014

University of Delaware group works with surveying equipment in Tilton Park in the Cool Springs area of Wilmington Saturday. The playground will be one focus of a park upgrade the students will help design, working with neighborhoods groups.
(Photo: ROBERT CRAIG)

WILMINGTON – Some residents of the Cool Springs neighborhood in west Wilmington would like to see a performance stage and better storm water drainage system added to Tilton Park.

Cool Springs leaders met with University of Delaware engineering students and faculty Saturday morning as part of ongoing efforts to make improvements to the park. The engineering students, who are part of a UD class dubbed Engineers Without Borders, also spent the morning and early afternoon surveying the land to gather data for a site plan.

J.W. Haupt, an associate vice president at engineering firm Pennoni Associates Inc.'s Newark office, was on the site at Tilton Park to help the students with surveying. He said one of the activities they performed was measuring the park's ground elevation, a detail he said is needed when working on things such as storm water drainage.

Abbie Clarke-Sather, an instructor for the UD class, said a team of four to six students in the class have been tasked with drawing up a redesign of Tilton Park. The redesign, she said, will be based on feedback the students get from neighborhood residents during the remainder of the spring semester.

"They're learning something valuable, and will give a site plan to the City of Wilmington," Clark-Sather said. "They're doing good, and learning something while they're doing it."

Clarke-Sather said the Tilton Park redesign is just one of several projects for the class. The other projects, she said, include the redesign of pedestrian bridges in Liberia and Malawi and the collection and re-use of waste in Tibet.

Rob Pfeiffer, president of the Friends of Tilton Park group, said he would like to see some sort of performance stage that could host events such as plays. He said he would also like to see an improved drainage system added to help clear water out of the park's playground after storms. He said the playground can sometimes be swamped for many days after big rainfalls.

"Sometimes it's all mucky in there," he said.

Pfeiffer, who lives across from the park on Seventh Street, said park improvements can go a long way in deterring criminal activities.

Pfeiffer said the park's lights didn't work for several years before he took the problem to the city last year. During his nine years in the neighborhood, he said he has witnessed drug dealing and occasional prostitution late at night in Tilton Park.

Pfeiffer said criminal activities occurred because the criminals got the sense that nobody watched them.

"Once the lights went on and the bushes were trimmed, overnight it was a different place," he said.

Efforts to improve Tilton Park fit into West Side Grows, an initiative to improve Wilmington's West Side.

Part of the initiative relies on park beautification, said Clara Zahradnik, who serves on West Side Grows' steering committee.

Zahradnik said purple flowers have already been planted in Tilton's lawn and are expected to sprout in two weeks.